Operations Management in the Not-for-Profit Sector

Improving Organizational Effectiveness of ‘The Active Citizen Project’
Your Names
Subject and Section
Professor’s Name
May 24, 2020
Understanding the operational processes and dynamics of different organizations is important for a leader. It allows him to be able to make well-defined, timely, and effective decisions that are crucial, especially in times when the company’s survival is at stake. While skills in process improvement have been apparent in most for-profit organizations, it must also be noted how important this is for nonprofit organizations. This is despite the fact that nonprofit organizations usually have a different set of objectives as compared to the profit-driven ones, which can also be bolstered by the improvement in terms of cost-efficiency, process delivery, and reduction of surpluses, among others. Accordingly, this paper would focus on the improvement of the operational processes of a New York-based Non-profit Organization named ‘The Active Project.’ More specifically, the main focus would be Project EATS, which is a sub-group that focuses on achieving sustainable, affordable, and equal access to healthy food resources for everyone.
Project EATS
As stated earlier, Project EATS is one of the main advocacies of the New York Project, which prioritizes in providing sustainable, accessible, and affordable food sources for everyone in order to reduce the impacts of inequality in society. It is their main belief that by improving food access and sustenance among people living in the urban places in the United States (specifically New York) inequality brought about by poverty, racial and sexual discrimination, and poor eating habits could be addressed. Accordingly, the group tends to do this by engaging in knowledge sharing, efficient use of urban land, and integrating local communities into the process (ProjectEATS.org, n.d.).
Improving Organizational Effectiveness
Despite being a nonprofit organization, Project EATS could surely improve their organizational effectiveness by focusing on three aspects, namely (1) diversifying head positions, (2) utilizing new technologies, and (3) utilizing performance metrics.
First, it could be seen that the organization could be improved by diversifying and specializing in head positions in the organization. For the most part, Project EATS have been developed based on a flat organizational structure that is administered by a few individuals with overlapping functions. Some of the head positions that the organization has included; (1) founder and president, (2) site farmer and market manager, and (3) project administrator, among others CITATION Prond1 \l 1033 (ProjectEATS.com, n.d.). For some years, this flat organizational structure has been effective in building their relationships with their volunteers as well as improving feedback mechanisms for the organization CITATION Sch16 \l 1033 (Schenkel & Brazeal, 2016). However, as the organization grows in numbers (volunteers and staff), certain bottlenecks have increased when it comes to the organization’s capacity for expansion and improvement.
Nevertheless, one way to addre...